The Brain in the Cathedral

Why care about concepts? Isn't it enough to feel, hear, watch, or touch? Well, to a point this seems sufficient. This is, after all, how little children cognize the world. Genuine human cognition, however, goes beyond the sensory. We don't just stop at the information provided by the external senses and perceive the world through colors, sounds, or smells. Our world also contains such things as cats, iPads, love, and blindness. This is because we think by means of concepts. How does it happen, however, that we switch from properties 'black', 'furry', and 'meowing', to the concept of cat? In the book, the question of the origin of concepts is tackled by medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest minds of all times, author of the slogan 'there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses' that has become the empiricist manifesto, and by Jerry Fodor, a contemporary philosopher and cognitive scientist famous for his controversial mad-dog concept nativism. The book shows that Aquinas is less of an empiricist than it is usually thought, and that Fodor can learn a valuable lesson from Aquinas concerning the kind of nativism that he should really accept.